EVENTS

Oh, jeez, it’s like a disease

“Our relationship started normally: We went for walks, saw films, went out for dinner. Most of the ‘arguments’ we’d have would be where to go out on a date. When I moved in with him after graduation, the arguments were about who would do the washing up or the cooking that night,” she says. By the end of their relationship in September, though, she found herself having to not only try to get Craig to do his share of the laundry, but to justify why people should be allowed to speak languages other than English in public, why removing taxes for tampons isn’t unfair, and more bizarrely, why being a feminist isn’t the same as being a Nazi.

“Nearly all the arguments came from YouTube videos he was watching,” Sarah tells me. “Because he’d work at night, he’d spend the day on the internet. He’d be watching them, and send them to me throughout the day on WhatsApp, over email, anywhere really.” During one work meeting in 2016, she received videos from him about a “migrant invasion into Britain, orchestrated by Angela Merkel and Barack Obama,” which showed Libyan refugees getting off a boat carrying large bags and shouting, “Thank you, Merkel!” played over dark orchestral music. Other videos supported Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants, diatribes on feminism “threatening traditional families” and “scientific evidence” suggesting that white people have higher IQs than black and South Asian people.

The article is a series of anecdotes about similar cases: these gentlemen start getting triumphal about reason and logic and evidence, and end up misusing reason and logic and evidence to rationalize hatred. So many of these stories sound exactly like what atheists were able to recognize as cult-like behavior, once upon a time.

Here’s a simple clue: you can be absolutely right about the nonexistence of god and the abuses of religion, and not be 100% right about everything else. That’s a logical truth, too.

Oh the irony.
He had a loving female partner who would probably been happy to have one of those “traditional families” if he hadn’t turned into a fascist.
Now he#s probably an “incel” blaming women and feminism.

“Because he’d work at night, he’d spend the day on the internet. ” Not for nothin, but if you work all night, you should probably be doing as I did and spend the day sleeping. I don’t watch many online videos. Do we need a ratings system; Q for Quckery, C for Conspiracy Theory, W for Wacky theories, Poo-Poo emoticon for “shit ideas” ?